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Message: <blockquote data-quote="S'mon" data-source="post: 216521" data-attributes="member: 463">I don't call my players stupid. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />The cleric belonged to a new, inexperienced player - they didn't know that even regular bears are very tough in 3e.  OTOH, in the real world one doesn't go into melee with a grizzly if one can help it, and they knew the cleric was relatively weak and vulnerable - in previous fights they'd kept her at the back providing healing support, but I guess they expected to kill the goblin bear with a round's worth of attacks.  Them's the breaks - in the original module this encounter was presented as suitable for _1st level_ PCs - for a group of 4th to 6th it was certainly survivable (possibly by not attacking in the first place).  I generally consider attacking big dumb animals for the XP to be rash but not necessarily stupid, given the potential XP gain.  After killing it two of the survivors levelled up, AIR.  And they did learn something from that fight, so the CR 6 XP award didn't seem unwarranted.</blockquote>